Page 189 of Break Away
My throat tightened. “I miss knowing somewhere he was hurting too.”
Neither of them rushed in. That was new. Or maybe it wasn’t new, and I had been too angry to notice they knew how to sit beside pain without trying to redecorate it.
Charm reached over me and squeezed Bliss’s hand, then mine. “For tonight, you put your hurt here.”
“In the popcorn?”
“In the couch,” she said.
Bliss nodded solemnly. “The couch can take it. This couch has absorbed tears, wine, nail glue, one full container of queso, and the emotional fallout of me pretending I didn’t want Cade Mercer to rearrange my life.”
“That queso incident was your fault,” I said.
“It was structurally unsound.”
“It was dip.”
“It betrayed me.”
I laughed again, softer this time, and Bliss’s cheek pressed against my shoulder like she was trying to keep the sound close.
Then someone pounded on the front door, and all three of us went still.
Not a polite knock. Not a neighbor tapping because our movie was too loud. A heavy, sharp pounding that cut straight through the apartment and made the snack bowls tremble on the coffee table.
Charm sat up first. “Absolutely not.”
Bliss reached for the remote like she could defend us with streaming technology. “Who knocks like they’re serving a warrant at eleven at night?”
My heart started doing something stupid before my brain allowed the thought.
Another knock hit the door, louder this time.
Bliss grabbed her phone from under the blanket and opened the Ring app so fast I almost respected the reflex morethan the panic. Charm leaned over her shoulder, the blanket falling around her waist.
The video loaded.
Easton stood outside our door in the rain.
My lungs forgot their job.
He wore a black KFU Fury hoodie, the hood down, blond hair soaked dark and plastered messily to his forehead. Rain ran down his face and dripped from his jaw. His shoulders looked too broad in the narrow hallway, his posture too exhausted to be threatening but too intense to be anything else. One hand was braced against the doorframe. The other hung at his side, wrapped knuckles half hidden by his sleeve.
He looked like every cliché I claimed to hate.
Rain-soaked. Exhausted. Miserable. Beautiful in a way that made me want to file a formal complaint with the universe.
Charm’s mouth fell open. “Oh.”
Bliss whispered, “Holy shit.”
I snatched the phone out of Bliss’s hand. “Why is he here?”
Charm recovered first, which was unfortunate for all of us. “I’m going to take a wild guess and say he is not here to return Tupperware.”
Bliss leaned around me, eyes bright with immediate, terrible excitement. “Is he here to rage fuck again?”
“Bliss,” I hissed.
